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Inner Sphere Cartography Society ArchiveMaps for the various BattleTech eras:Here are the latest ISCS map files for the various eras that the ISCS has collected data for:
Recent News:
Datafiles for the ISCS:The datafiles have been compressed with gzip and archived with tar. Various programs on all the major platforms should have utilities that can uncompress and extract them. You will need the ISCS Include Files and the Era Files with POV-Ray 3.x to render a map for a particular order.
History:The "Inner Sphere Map Project" compiled the first Inner Sphere map file for the 3025 era from the data given in the back of the BattleTech House Books. At one point, my gaming group helped to update the file from 3025 to 3052. I also happened to come across a PC program that drew a map of the Inner Sphere with data files for 3025, 3030, and 3039. Once I had all of these data files and the suggestion to make one combined data file, I decided to do it. Shortly there after, I made a post to rec.games.mecha for help to correct some of the errors that cropped up from trying to combine all the files. Thus the Inner Sphere Cartography Society (ISCS) was born out of Team SPAM!'s need for acurate and complete map files for both the Planet Hop and JumpShip Path CGIs. In adition to getting the data from the "Inner Sphere Map Project", I obtained a postscript file of the Inner Sphere and an awk script. I converted an awk script to perl and rewrote most of it to handle generating output files for the different eras at the same time. Instead of generating postscript, my revised script generated commands for a program called fly and more recently POV-Ray 3.0.1. fly is a program that takes your input and generates a gif file and POV-Ray is a powerful ray tracing program to make photo quality images. In addition to drawing all the planets, I took the JumpShip Path cgi data file and used it to draw the jumps to all the planets in the same faction. The jumps help to give an idea to the borders for the different factions. Update: I had another break through in the development of the maps. While toying around with developing a map for revised version of Succession Wars, I came up with the idea of using a hex map for the regions of the Inner Sphere. This idea has been ported over the maps for ISCS and has provided me with a much better way define the holdings of the factions. Another improvement in the POV-Ray code is the fact that I am breaking down the information into seperate file that reduced the overall size of the code. It is now possible for the colors to be changed without having to generate the whole POV-Ray file again. This reduction in size lets me hand out the POV-Ray code for others to play with. Note that the available code does not include the jump links that are present in the images here. Any advice from users of POV-Ray or users of other unix/linux ray tracing packages is welcomed. I'm looking for suggestions from people for better faction colors and lighting tips. Contributors to the ISCS:
Archived FilesAt various points in time, these were the test cases that I used to render Available now are older images used by the ISCS. These images show the development and progress made with POV-Ray to make better maps for the ISCS. 3025 was used as the base for developing the maps as there were only 5 main factions to worry about.
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Michael J. Flynn | Tue, Oct 21, 2003 |